Nfrwt - Beautiful
by Shadow Goat Alice
Summary: Sam grabs a coffee and gets some intel with it.


_**AN: **__It really is a real thing according to NASA. You can even take classes at the jet propulsion labs at Cal Tech. I shit you not. This is a couple days after Tenement._

**Nfrwt - Beautiful**

Sam hadn't gotten to buying a coffee maker yet and had found the coffee shop around the corner from the apartment building almost immediately. The owner was super nice and would sell her a pot worth of coffee in the morning knowing she'd come back for a mochaccino later in the day when her sweet tooth kicked in. It seemed to be a popular student hang out or it was simply close enough to her apartment and a couple others to attract her classmates. She recognized a couple faces. The brunette who had smiled at her but apologized that she was going on shift and the cop down the hall with dark hair and a friendly smile were sitting together and laughing over something in a newspaper they were reading together.

The only other face she recognized was Daniel who was waving her over, grinning.

"Sam? Right?"

"Yah." She said smiling at him. He seemed really nice in an absent sort of way. His eyes lingered on the pretty and exotic barista with a mop of curls tied back in a way that suggested her hair tie was in danger of breaking.

"So what do you think of the complex?"

"Everyone seems very nice, friendly. I like that you can't get in unless you're let in or have a key."

"Yah, me too. Not that anyone would take my stuff as it looks like a bunch of junk to anyone but an archeologist." He said chuckling, his mop of blond hair flopping in his eyes.

"Well, the last thing I want is my ex showing up." Sam admitted, sipping her coffee. "It's not like I have any stuff to steal."

"How come?"

"Left it at my ex's place. Small price to pay to get out of that situation."

"Bad huh?"

"Pretty bad, yah. So what's your story?" Sam asked, swiftly changing the subject from the uncomfortable topic of Jonas Hanson.

"Me? Oh not much there. I like school and my parents left me enough money to just do that instead of getting a job so here I am." He said dismissively.

"That sounds nice other than losing your parents part." Sam said of being able to go to school endlessly.

"Yah. Jack keeps asking if I plan on being a Disney princess."

Sam snorted in mirth. "That's just mean." She said laughing.

Daniel laughed. "Yah but it's a little true. My parents are dead. I don't have a job and technically Jack could have been my stray animal friend I took in for a while."

"He wasn't always the landlord here?"

"Nah. We met years ago when I was high school age. I took this astronomy course and I was the only kid there so Jack kind of decided to try to figure out what my deal was. We got talking and once he found out I was getting bounced from foster home to foster home he convinced me to come hang out with his buddies instead. After his divorce he crashed on my couch for a long time until George gave him a job."

Daniel was pretty sure he'd left out the parts Jack should tell her himself but Jack seemed to like this girl and Daniel had a pretty good feeling about her as a person.

By Daniel's observations, Jack had hit cautiously optimistic about women and a woman coming out of a bad break up would need to take things slow so it might be a good fit he thought to himself.

"Jack tells me you are starting your doctorate in physics this year."

"Yup. I skipped ahead a couple years early on but I was still bored in high school so dad let me take whatever I wanted at the community college. By graduation I could have earned an Associates too so I finished my Masters last year after skipping over getting a Bachelors."

"That's pretty impressive Sam. I'm fairly smart and I'm good at languages but you don't get a degree quicker taking more language classes."

"Yah. That seems kind of unfair." Sam said and sipped her coffee. "I'm trying to get a Masters in Engineering while I take my doctorate classes so I'm picking up some classes over the summer. A couple of the professors seem to enjoy teaching year round."

Daniel chuckled. "By that comment I assume you mean Professor Mac?"

Sam grinned. "He gets so excited about it you can't help but want to learn all this crazy stuff. The class I just signed up for, he is going to have us make a model aerial delivery system. He said he knew a guy that could launch a tank out of the back of an aircraft and swears he has video of it being done."

"That's nuts."

"I agree. But who knows with the military these days. My brother keeps telling me he works in 'deep space radar telemetry'. I am almost positive he is lying."

Daniel shook his head. He didn't know much about the military himself other than what he'd learned from Jack and Cam who was two years behind Jack or would be had they not medically discharged Jack for his eyesight getting nearly as bad as Daniel's own from trying to earn his degrees. Teal'c and Daniel were probably the only ones living at Star Gate Tower that knew how smart Jack really was. He had kept his mouth shut about his opinion of Sara's intelligence as Jack had clearly deeply loved her, but that didn't stop him from noticing that she wasn't the brightest girl he'd ever met.

"So who's the girl you keep checking out?" Sam asked him with a coy smile, having noticed Daniel's eyes cut to the barista multiple times during their conversation.

"Oh, uh, that's Sha're. She's been working here a little while for Jeanie, she's the owner."

"Have you asked her out?" Sam asked him pointedly.

"Er, no, not yet anyway. I'm still trying to work up the courage." He admitted.

"I think she thinks we're on a date." Sam said thoughtfully.

"Ah, why do you say that exactly?"

"Well," Sam said with an amused smirk. "She keeps giving me dirty looks for starters."

"She does?" Daniel nearly squeaked which made Sam smile more brightly.

"It's probably a good thing superpowers aren't a real thing." Sam said with a laugh. "I need to get to class anyway. I'll see you around Daniel. Good luck with the thing."

"Which thing?"

Sam cut her eyes to Sha're. "The _thing_." She said laughing and walked out the door.

Once outside on the sidewalk, Sam mulled over what Daniel had told her about Jack. He was handsome in a similar way as Professor Mac was. In fact, they looked quite a bit alike or would if Jack grew his hair out, smiled more and didn't look suspicious all the time.

She definitely wanted to get to know Jack. She'd felt the most intense instant attraction to the man and was glad Daniel had given her some insight. Divorced would explain his cautious approach to having a fling with her. He probably was making sure she wasn't crazy first. Sam's current threshold for crazy was apparently very high. Jonas had been… a mistake. One she'd made mostly because she'd been trying to annoy her dad with a man who was charming on the surface and quite dark underneath.

Sam had mistakenly thought, as most women her age tended to, that his additional years over her would make him her equal in maturity. She'd been deeply wrong and now all she was looking for was a casual hook up or a friend with benefits if she liked him enough as a person. Jack liked astronomy so that gave her things to talk about with him.

In retrospect what she saw in Jonas was debatable. He wasn't bad looking and Sam had a tendency to want to fix things and sometimes that extended to trying to fix people. This went well when it was a friend with limited social graces but apparently not so well when the person in question was attempting to isolate you from your friends.

Her old friends had drifted away from her one by one until all she had left was Jonas which had likely been his plan. Jack on the other hand had led her around to anyone who was home the day after she met him. Having nowhere else to go he'd let her crash in her apartment until the paperwork was ready to go the next day. He'd told her not to tell George Hammond, his boss. Sam had to work hard to _not_ tell him Uncle George was unlikely to ever get angry at him for being kind. So she'd met Dr. Rush and Eli, Janet Frasier who was a first year resident at the near by hospital, Walter Harriman who lived upstairs from Jack and managed the comic book shop, Sylvester Siler, the maintenance man and his wife Mary, Teal'c who owned a cleaning business and frequently traded building cleaning services for his rent payments, Lou Ferretti who told her about game night even though his work schedule didn't let him attend most of the time and several others who had lived in the building a few years. Janet had invited her to dinner with her daughter Cassie that night and when Sam had hesitated Jack had accepted for her. After, he'd explained that Janet was going to mother her either way and it was easier to just let her do it.

Sam had laughed only to find Jack's assessment accurate. Jack's insights on all the residents had been so spot on she'd been surprised to learn he'd only lived here a year and a half himself and spent part of that time crashing on Daniel's couch.

Jack, like anyone, had his favorites in Daniel and Teal'c who had told Sam that the three of them spent most nights watching science fiction shows and asked if she liked Wormhole X-Treme! Jack seemed to be the middle child in this arrangement as Teal'c had a few years on him though it was difficult to tell how many exactly.

Sam had reached the science and technology building though and chugged the rest of her coffee. Not that Professor Mac minded but he had a habit of excitedly waving his arms sometimes and she didn't have a locking lid on the take-out cup. On second thought, he was nothing like Jack, just a passing resemblance, that's all. She decided and entered the building.


End file.
